By james art Pointing a flashlight up to illuminate his darkened face, 10-year-old Ashton Allen on Thursday introduced his classmates to the strange, dark but ultimately happy tale of “The Limbo Lumberjack.”
Dressed in a red plaid shirt and “husky blue jeans,” the recently deceased lumberjack waited, seated on a large sofa in a gray room.
“He didn’t have a head, but somehow he could see,” Allen said.
The public reading on Thursday, the day of Halloween, was the culmination of a month-long creative writing project at St. Thomas More Catholic School in Baton Rouge.
As part of the project, Ashton and some of his fellow students created “ghost stories” to coincide with the holiday. On Thursday they read them aloud.
Ashton’s teacher, Anneke Neubig, stood by his side Thursday. The two exchanged reading different passages from Ashton’s story.
Neubig teaches fifth- through eighth-graders as part of REACH — short for Religious Education for All Children — a diocesan program for students with intellectual disabilities who could benefit from a special environment.
When he arrived in Neubig’s class, Ashton could barely read.
Lisa Weishaar, who works as a teaching assistant with Neubig, said that after some trial and error, she settled on a strategy.
“I noticed that he likes to draw. He mentioned that he wanted to make books. I said, ‘Okay, let’s make books,’ and then we started pulling words out of it all,” Weishar recalled.
One of these drawings, of a headless woodcutter, was the seed for Ashton’s story.
In the process of writing
As a student at LSU, Neubig remembers loving her creative writing classes. She also enjoyed her concentration in anthropology, where she learned about folktales and oral histories.
In 2022, with some trepidation, she decided she wanted to do something with her REACH students that would bring them joy similar to what she experienced in college.
“I just didn’t know what that was going to look like for teenagers and what it was going to look like for kids who were struggling with reading and writing.” Not everyone does, but some do,” Neubig said. “What does this look like? Can you create a good story if you have spelling problems?’
“I definitely think the answer is yes,” she concluded.
To help kids get going, Neubig has them fill out a “world-building sheet” where they define the setting for their stories and the rules that apply. So if, say, you’re writing about vampires, what kind? Classic vampires or more modern scenes like in Interview with the Vampire or Twilight?
Ashton began his story about the newly deceased lumberjack in a bureaucratic waiting room he calls Limbo, a clear nod to the movie “Beetlejuice.”
Once they have a world, students write and then rewrite repeatedly over the next month. Neubig allows his students to use speech-to-text technology for free.
Rewriting dozens of times a month can be a tough sell at first.
“They didn’t understand that writing actually takes a lot longer than advertised,” she said.
The classrooms they come from don’t work like that.
“You get an assignment, you write it, and that’s the end of it,” Neubig said. “It’s a week-long process,”
So much rewriting also means a lot of work for Neubig, who edits stories daily.
One of her students, whose story became a short novel, became very demanding.
“He wants it every day, immediately, and if I don’t, I’m in trouble,” she laughed.
In addition to editing stories as they update in Google Docs, Neubig also offers one-on-one help. Students must first fill out a registration form. When their time comes, they sit in what Neubig calls the “ghost chair,” complete with a pillow emblazoned with the word “Ghost.”
The woodcutter
Ashton’s finished story is not long, only five paragraphs,
When the headless woodcutter’s number, 39, is finally called, he enters an empty room and is confronted by three “strangely shaped” doors. He tries every one.
Passing through the circle-shaped door 1, the woodcutter heads into a desert world, where he immediately encounters a hungry sand wolf; the woodcutter returns the way he came.
The second, slimy, rectangular-shaped door opens to another room with a large egg on the floor. A snail named Whiskers emerges from the egg. Whiskers angrily orders the woodcutter to leave “because I’m trying to turn into a butterfly”.
The third door, covered with painted trees, proves the charm. Inside he finds a forest waiting.
“He lived happily ever after because he loved trees and loved to cut them down,” the story concludes.
Ashton said trying not to be too serious.
“I just want to be stupid,” he explained.
More scary tales
Other ghost stories had less happy endings.
Andrew Lemo, 11, sets his story “Stuck in a Haunted School” in Lowville, a town “overrun” by “ghosts, zombies, mummies and werewolves.”
Neubig said that Lemo had some processing difficulties and therefore had a hard time at first coming up with which monsters he wanted. Neubig and the boy end up going through a series of pictures of different monsters before they find the right ones.
To combat the influx of monsters, the town of Lowville hires a group of security guards. Sarah and her father are hired to look after the school’s security, but the job only lasts five terrifying nights.
“Why is it only five days?” Neubig asked Andrew at one point while writing. Her question caused a long silence.
“Just something to think about,” she continued gently.
Andrew’s story also had no end.
“Can you think of anything that happens when they get caught?” Neubig asked.
Andrew said he got it.
When it was time to read, Andrew, dressed as a zombie, read his story confidently, using a ghostly voice at times.
For the finale, Andrew revealed that on the fifth night, a mummy jumped out of a locker at school and grabbed Sarah and her father. They were fired from their jobs: “The horde of monsters took over the whole school and the town. The city is now called the City of Monsters.
Teacher Anneke Neubig helps student Zoe Willis put on her mermaid costume before reading her ghost story to the class at St. Thomas More Catholic School on Halloween.
Zoe Willis brought a theatrical flair to a reading of her ghost story “Ester Moon: The Curse of the Black Sea,” one of two Thursday stories that feature mermaids. Before starting, Zoe had to be helped into her mermaid outfit, a task made more difficult because she had eaten “a pan full of lasagna” the night before.
After the last student read his story, Neubig surprised the classroom by grabbing the flashlight; she had written her own story.
Neubig drew inspiration from his Halloween costume. She dressed as a Dalmatian on Thursday, and Weisshar dressed as “Cruella de Vil,” the villain in the 1961 film “101 Dalmations.”
Her story centered around a “haunted dog” named Spotty who roamed the streets of the town of Dog Villa and who claimed to be “able to lead lost souls home or trap them forever.” The only kid in town who wasn’t too scared to approach Spotty was Kegan—played by student Kegan Wilson, who helpfully stood up. Spotty and Kegan eventually joined forces, reappearing every Halloween to bring lost souls home.
Teacher Anneke Neubig sneaks up on student Amelia Sray as she reads her ghost story in a dimly lit classroom at St. Thomas More Catholic School on Halloween. Neubig surprised his class with a ghost story of his own after the students finished reading their terrifying tales.
As a child, Neubig suffered from dyslexia and attention deficit disorder while growing up, causing her to question her intelligence. She said she wants her students to face their fears, to see that they can create their own valuable things.
“It’s a moment where they can express themselves with their story or their voice, their costumes, their drawings,” Neubig explained. “Everyone has the ability to be creative.”